I got Syd started on her first Zelda game, The Skyward Sword for the Wii.
She of course claims it to be the best Zelda ever made....

We really had a hard
time coming up with the cake this time. There is so much in the game, it's
actually quite hard to decide what goes into the cake. Needless to say I had to
cut 90% of the stuff I wanted on there. The original plan included a portion of
every map and 4 times more characters :/. Here are a few of the sketches
that weren't tossed, sketch 1,
sketch 2,
sketch 3,
sketch 4,
sketch 5. In my final
design I had Groose riding back and forth on the completed railway on the
catapult cart but after I started building, the scale wasn't going to work out
so I had to cut the railway to a small section on either side and put Groose on
the bottom as if building it. Covering the front of the cake with a
railway would have looked terrible (I thank Lili for that observation early, I
don't know how much I'd have built before realizing it). The rail itself
is made of foamcore painted like wood.

The video starts out at Skyloft (the
main town of the game) with the shop keeper pedaling around and around waiting
for the bell to ring and two other riders flying under the city then it expands
outward to Link flying, Scrapper hoisting the pinwheel away from its landing
place and Ghirahim hovering up and down over the tornado. Technically Ghirahim
never hovers over a tornado but since it was he that produced the wind storm
that pulled Zelda below the clouds, I decided to take some creative license
there (otherwise I didn't know where to put him). It then pans down to The
Sealed Grounds just outside of the Faron Woods. This is another area you spend a
fair amount of time in during the game. I was able to put two other baddies in
this area, the Deku-Baba and the Octorok. Groose is working on his railway that
wraps around the grounds later in the game and his catapult cart is half
finished on the ground. Zelda is playing her harp and (young) Impa is standing
in front of the temple while the Gate of Time ticks away inside. I know
Impa should be old but I like the younger version more.

The Gate of Time in the temple is an Archos 404 that I've had lying around
for years unused. I made an
enclosure with foam core and put a hole in the base so I could put the
player in from the bottom after everything was ready. Playing the game, I centered the Gate of Time on the
TV and recorded it
with my phone for a while then transferred the video to the Archos. I set
it up to loop the video and away it went. Sadly a very low tech way of
getting it done but I wasn't about the cart the Wii to the computer to and
record video directly, ugh, that sounds like work. I'm so old.

Skyloft was my favorite part. I
glued sections of foam together and cut
it out with a hot knife. I was able to get numerous shots from internet
for reference and had Sydney run and fly all around while taking pictures.
I printed an overhead view of the islands in the scale I wanted and traced that
onto the foam. After a lot of cutting/melting and gluing parts back on I
got the basic town layout. I had a good time carving the
goddess statue. I admit the model is still missing a ton of details
but overall the basics are here. I even found some miniature trees that scaled
perfectly. This year I found some new motors, Christmas ornament motors.
Very very small so I was able to hide them in Skyloft. I epoxied on the
thin wire for the birds and shop. The only issue is the motors run from
2.5-4.5 volts AC. I honestly couldn't find an easy way to get that little
AC to the motors so I used a string of lights. I just cut and
spliced into
the light string in two places and ran the thinner wires up to Skyloft. So
under the cake was a bunched up string of Christmas lights. I was planning
to add blue cellophane to the water features of Skyloft to make it appear watery
but that small detail fell to the side the last few days in a rush to finish. In
the end I was the only one tall enough to see Skyloft so no one noticed the
omission. I also wanted to add some poles for flags as there are a lot in
the town.

The tornado was made from the same glued foam. I cut the basic shape
and trimmed away with a hot knife to give it some texture. I hollowed out
the top to allow Girahim to lower his feet into (I thought this would be a neat
effect). A little gray paint and stuffing glued to the outside and it
looked very tornadoish. I also placed a
small fan with a 9V battery in
the tornado to blow air up. The air was supposed to make Girahim's cape
flutter. Eh, it did somewhat, I think you can see the cape move in the
video :P.

The Octorok moved up and looked left/right using a Prop1 board and 2 servos.
Its a great little board! I've had great success with it, one day I should
probably try an Arduino but I haven't needed one yet.

I literally have no photos of the motors under the cake. That is
strange, I usually remember to take a few, I guess we were running too much in
the end. All of the other movements were the same basic types I've been
able to use on other cakes. The only one that was somewhat odd was Girahim
because of how high he was. His motor is very similar to others but I had
to keep him from rocking on the ball joint. I
bent the wire and squeezed it
between some wood just above the motor, this only let him rock slightly on
the ball, which was great because he would come down, slide over go up, slide
over, come down.....The upper portion he was held by another
looped rod behind the tornado.

Lili did all of the characters from Sculpey clay except for Link (I was able
to use my Figma Link), that seems to be our favorite molding medium here at
home. Sculpey is cheap and easy. I laid out the scale, wireframes
and photos and let her go. She was a good sport about it even though there
were a bunch to make. She had them all done the first week and then went
to work on the 2 dozen hats for party favors. We did get Syd a blue Link
hat for the party from Etsy as we
liked the design even though it is more of a LOZTP style. After cutting and
sewing for days she finished just in time to be stressed out to get everything
else done around the house for the party. I'm useless the 2nd week as I do
cake and only cake so its all on her to prepare everything else.

I put my mom to work on the clouds. She covered the 1/4" MDF cloud base
with white paint mixed with glue and stuck on white stuffing. Looked
awesome in the end. Cotton candy would have been preferred but we don't
have a CC machine and I don't realistically know how we would have stuck it on
the underside of the board.

The Temple entrance is 6 batches of Rice Krispies and the
backside of the temple is 9 cakes stacked as high as we could make it. The
dome was a nightmare. Having done some rice krispees before I thought it
would harden very easily and be done. Luckily my parent came to visit for
the party because they saved me. My dad and I ran all over to find a bowl
large enough to form the dome, it took several stores to find something and even
then it was too small. We started cooking and packing the dome which all
looked great. The next day we thought it would be good to go for cake and
fondant. Not at all, once we removed the bowl it was slowly sagging down
in the center. We added sticks which did nothing. We pongeed the
edges so they couldn't slide out but that didn't help. We added foam
around the outside to make it taller so the characters would fit, it was still
sinking. Finally I had to add a strip of fondant wrapped Sintra under the
front edge, it went completely from one side to the other, that finally stopped
it. Once that was done, everything was somewhat smooth after that.
Again my dad saved me, I am not a good fondant worker and he'd never done it
before. But he was in great spirits so that got us through. After hours
and hours of smooshing and squeezing we got the cake and fondant on there.
I decided that we had way too much food on there already so we made the small
towers on either side behind the dome out of styrofoam wrapped with fondant.
I knew we'd never eat that much so no harm in cheating a bit, and that way we
didn't have to worry about them sinking or tipping during the party. The
large towers behind those are 4x4s that hold the clouds up, they are also
wrapped in fondant to keep a uniform look. The base is also covered in
fondant to keep the same look. It just so happed to be a cool morning the
next day so we moved the cake outside for spraying (spraying will wreck your
house as we've experienced, dust EVERYWHERE FOR MONTHS). The cake itself
looks fairly small on the 4' wide base but really it was huge, we never did
finish it despite the 50 people at the party and we munched on it for days.
Still had to throw a few cakes worth away.

We added some paper grass around. I got 2 rupees on there (green and
blue). There is a bomb on the left side which would have been used for the
catapult by Groose. There is a bird and an insect on the railway. We were hoping to add
more details around the temple using frosting and/or fondant but that mostly
went unfinished too. Some obvious omissions that were meant to be added were drool on the Deku-Baba
and the propeller on Scrapper :/. I really have no idea how I ran out of time
for those two details but I did. The blue sky all the way to the ground
wasn't the original intent either, my plan was to print some forest background
from the game but after working on it I decided that you couldn't see the forest
from here. I changed to adding a brick wall on either side from the tall towers
to match but once we got going that didn't seem important enough so we worked on
other details....

HOWEVER, it turned out super cute and really just what I
was going for.

Syd has since started The Twilight Princess and has
exclaimed that it is better than the Skyward Sword (she loves animals so riding
a horse and turning into a wolf is apparently awesome).